Jude's Giant

Jude's Giant

If you ask a small person to draw something, they just draw it. 

You ask a person over the age of 16 to draw something and you witness something entirely different, I think it can be described as panic. Sheer panic, anxiety and a sprinkle of stress.

There is the stress that it won’t look good, that somebody can draw it better, is it anatomically correct? Have I researched into the subject? Has somebody drawn something like this before? How do I start? I think I need to clean the house before I start... Do I have the correct tools for the task? 

But children just draw. I miss that. I miss the sheer enjoyment of just drawing without thinking about it or feeling like I need reference images to use so it looks 'correct'. When you are small you approach drawing armed only with your imagination, if you are asked to draw a dinosaur, you draw a dinosaur how you think it looks rather than worrying about if it is correct. You draw a dinosaur with three heads, a colander for a hat and a smaller dinosaur for a necklace, just because. 

This is what we should still be doing, not just in drawing but in every situation. We need to enter a situation armed only with our own ideas, voices and choices - there is no need to let what other people think or what other people would do cloud the situation.

As Roald Dahl once said ‘Growing older is no excuse for growing up’. Hear, hear.